Dolphins in trouble…

I read this story yesterday and it nearly brought me to tears:
Dolphin story

Five exhausted dolphins have been trapped behind drifting pack ice for several days and now need rapid rescue, according to the mayor of an eastern Canadian village.

The 8-foot animals somehow became separated from the open Atlantic and have been swimming for four days in a shrinking open-water area of Seal Cove’s harbor, just 100 feet from shore, said Mayor Winston May said Wednesday.

“They keep going round circles, trying to keep this little pool of water open so that they can have their breathing area. And the whole bay seems to be froze up, there’s no where else for them to go,” said May.

Wayne Ledwell, an expert on whale rescues, said dolphins won’t swim long distances under ice since they need to surface regularly to breathe and the slabs of ice would make that impossible.

Ledwell, who heads Whale Release and Strandings Group, which rescues whales and dolphins, said that if the ice continues to encroach on the open area the dolphins could eventually drown.

May said he asked Canada’s federal Fisheries Department to send an icebreaker to create a channel to the open Atlantic, but that he was told no vessels were available.

“They’re not going to survive much longer,” said May. “You can hear (the dolphins) crying all night long,” he said.

“You could hear the screams coming out of them,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. quoted resident Stanley Banks as saying. “And they were trying to break the ice there just to survive. And there’s us here empty-handed. And DFO (Fisheries) with all this money won’t even send a boat in here to let those out? It’s a crime.”

Ledwell said that sending an icebreaker could pose problems as well. “Those boats push ice ahead of them and that can crush the animal, and that has happened before,” the CBC quoted Ledwell as saying.

The dolphins are regular visitors to the waters around Newfoundland’s Seal Cove, which is about 400 miles northwest of capital city St. John’s.

SO, I was really sad for these dolphins. I’ve pet a few dolphins at SeaWorld and I always wanted to swim with them. They are very fascinating animals. So, I wanted to see what happened to them and I found a: follow up story

A group of local men braved dangerous broken ice and frigid waters in a fibreglass speedboat to rescue a pod of dolphins and help them back to open water, the mayor of Seal Cove, N.L., said Thursday.

“We didn’t get any response from (the Department of Fisheries and Oceans). It takes so long to get things done when you go through government departments,” said Mayor Winston May. “So, some local guys decided to put out their small speedboat and put on their survival suits, and didn’t they put a channel through the water to where the dolphins was at.”

The dolphins had been stranded by a slab of ice since Sunday in White Bay off the coast of Seal Cove, a village of about 400 people. A chunk of ice was rapidly closing in around the mammals and threatening to suffocate them.

“You’d hear them crying, every night,” said one of the men in the boat, Rodney Rice, 39. “I went down there last night and you could hear them trying to break up more ice. . . . They wouldn’t have lasted another day.”

May said it took the four men about three hours to break a channel in the ice with their boat, and one — Brandon Banks, 16 — got into the water and helped calm one of the dolphins weakened by the ordeal so they could tow it to open water.

“I had a floater suit on,” said Banks, “And they would come up and rest their head on me and I would keep their head out of the water so they can breathe through their blowhole.”

May said the men carved a channel by ramming the five-metre fibreglass-hulled boat up onto the ice, then jumping out and onto the ice to hack away at it. He said it took them three hours before they had a path from the main body of water to the pool of slush and water where the dolphins were trapped, a distance of about 250 metres, he said.

“One of the dolphins was really weak, and one of the young guys who had a survival suit on got into the water with it and stayed with it, and the dolphin just kind of wrapped his fins around him. . . . It was amazing.”

He said two of the dolphins made for the open water, while the third, weaker one “they had to give some help,” May said. “They put a harness around it and gradually took it out to the main body of water. . . . And local boys done it.”

May said they were at the point where something had to be done to save the dolphins.

“The mammals were getting so weak, if somebody didn’t do something in the next 12 to 48 hours, they would have died.”

May acknowledges what the men did was “pretty dangerous. It was pretty scary . . . but I guess they felt that somebody had to help.”

Lydia Banks is the mother of 16-year-old Brandon, the youth who went into the water in a survival suit to help the weakest of the pod.

“I’m proud of him. It was good what he done,” she said. “Before, everybody was saying somebody’s got to get out there and help them. So they took action.”

She said her son told her the dolphins “had cuts on them everywhere where they were beating themselves up on the ice.”

The dolphins were initially frightened by the boat and the men, but after a few minutes, “the mammals were so friendly once they got to know the boat. The two just followed the boat right out to open water,” May said.

“It’s a beautiful ending. It’s been an emotional last few days,” he said. “The one was really weak, but even he swimmed away. Once they get out to open water, they’ll get food and we’ll just pray and hope that nature will look after them.”

Seal Cove is about 600 kilometres northwest of St. John’s.

I don’t care what you say, Canadians are all right in my book.